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She had always been a girl who looked for something in nothing.

As a child, the creek behind her house was not a creek. It was a moat surrounding an invisible castle nestled at the base of a great mountain where massive (and also invisible) forest trolls came to get water for their stew. Peas were not vegetables, but the pickled eyes of Keebler Elves plucked from their skulls and repackaged for the masses. Peas represented the Great Keebler Genocide, obviously perpetrated by the Cabbage Patch Kids who were bitter after years of being looked down upon by the more popular, sweet-creating elves. Sharks could navigate through the water pipes and attack people in swimming pools, with or without laser beams attached to their heads. All storm drains had monsters lurking just beneath the grating. All partially opened closets had goblins hiding just past the edge of the light.

The girl who grew into the woman who chose to become Eta IV was a believer in the unbelievable.

When she was still a child, her imagination made her adorable, charming, unique. As she got older, it did not dull. It became less cute, less charming. Her imagination could not be sated. Things got worse when she became a teenager. Her insistence that there was a monster under her bed when she was fourteen had her parents sending her to therapy. The fact that she seemed pleased about this fact only made them more concerned. Her fearlessness about prowling darkened streets in college disturbed her friends. Her insistence that graveyards were the most magical places full of the most startling energies brought on puzzled looks and awkward shifting. Her tireless need to research great disasters and freak occurrences made her creepy, odd, out of place. She was not afraid of the dark; she thrived in it. As she got older, she simply gained the abstract thinking necessary to take what had been fantasies and dreams as a child and rationalize them into fully-realized concepts and worlds.

When she was approached by a mysterious figure about an opportunity to pull back the curtain and see the truth of the shadows, the girl could not refuse. She hardly needed to think about it, or who she would be leaving behind in pursuit of it. In all of her many fascinations about the world, a world that she felt convinced she experienced more fully than those around her, she had played out this scenario in her head countless times. It was the realization of a childhood dream: she was the special one, she was out of place because she was greater than those around her, she was imbued with skills others could not dream of, she was the one with the special destiny.

And finally she knew it to be true.

Adventure, imagination, passion -- they were her lifeblood. She could be dedicated when achieving her goals. She could be caring when it helped her cause, and cruel when it became necessary. The girl who became Eta IV had never been afraid of getting her hands dirty for a greater purpose. She had never been afraid of sacrifice.

The stranger who approached her spouting ideas about the truth and secrets of the shadows did not need much time to convince her. She was willing to believe most anything, especially something that made her feel so wonderfully important. In the flash of an eye, she could remember the words that came from that figure on their last meeting before she signed away her life for the promise of a greater purpose: "...mankind doesn't have to be the cattle any longer. Nor even prey with a fighting chance. Because people like me, people like you, have the ability to become Hunters." A hunter. A predator from a fantastic existence. A chosen one.

It was what she had wanted her entire life.

There was a family in the world she left behind. She had a mother who loved her, and a father who tried to. She had two younger sisters who had grown out of their fears and imaginations before they were holding cellphones and texting boyfriends. There was a graduation ahead of her, a future beyond that. She loved sushi and hated asparagus. Lightning was exhilarating, and sunny days made her feel disgusting. Her favorite book was Harry Potter, and her favorite movie was Labyrinth. In the ninth grade, she played Adelaide in her school’s production of Guys and Dolls. In her senior year, she broke her arm trying to scale the side of the cafeteria for a class prank.

These were the parts of the whole that made the person that she was. These were the attributes that swirled together to manufacture the girl who wanted more than the life she had been given. Eta IV had believed that her time on the island was meaningless without her memories. Tiny bits of herself, all taken for granted, until it was too late to recover them. As darkness leaked into her ears, she tried to feel regret, but knowing herself, feeling the return of all of those memories that had been stripped from her, she was forced to recognize that she would do it all over again, even if it ended the same way.

Eta IV had gotten the chance to learn more about the true nature of the universe than she ever would have living in a tiny rowhouse in Baltimore, Maryland.

And so, as her existence began to separate like a tissue torn apart in a swell of water, the girl who became Eta IV realized what she had been living for all this time: epiphany. She had given up the life she had for a chance at one she had never known, and it was worth it, just to know that she had been right, that she had been special and different -- and that there was nothing wrong with that. Even in this final death, the girl who wanted to see behind the curtain had no regrets.

Her name was Hanna Nowicki. And she was dead.

The first thing Hanna was aware of in the tingling moments after she accepted both her death and the choices that had lead up to it was the stark bite of sea salt. There had been a door, hadn't there? A weightlessness? Her mind reeled to remember things -- a kind of greedy grasping for identifying marks that had escaped her the entire time on the island.

A voice broke the thoughts spinning through Hanna's mind. She froze. Her hand gripped dumbly for a weapon, and then she remembered she had none. She had nothing. In the darkness, Hanna remained silent, listening to the voice speak. It was the only thing she was certain of in the darkness: the voice and the wet, salty air.

Stuck in a loop? Coma? Hanna didn't want to be any of those things, she never had. She just wanted to feel the world so strongly, to experience it on levels that no one else could. It was a need to be more than she was, and it had been there her entire life. No one needed to push her to this. No one needed to even wait.

Hanna closed her eyes, accepted the darkness she had never been afraid of, and imagined a twin bladed weapon resting in her hand. She squeezed the handle, eyes focused, mind clear. There could be no end, she told herself, just an endless road of new beginnings. Hanna wanted to live a life worth living -- living, dying, fighting, all of it.